As the World Wide Web (Web) has grown to be an integral source for information and communication, advertising has become a major source of revenue for Web site providers and has created an additional medium for advertisers to present their messages to a wide audience. Increased bandwidth has led to more sophisticated and eye catching advertising. However, even with the increased download time provided by increased bandwidth, pages with extensive and/or sophisticated advertising can be slow to load. This may result in a Web site user becoming disinterested and navigating elsewhere.
In its early years, the Web provided only static content, that is, every person accessing the same Web page would view the exact same information. Later, Web publishers began to provide custom content wherein, for example, a user could specify what types of information they wanted to see on a Web page. In order to provide custom content, the user would most often be required to register with the Web site in order to receive logon credentials. When a returning user would logon to a Web site, the users preferences could be retrieved from a database and the content matching those preferences could be displayed within the user's Web browser. In the latest evolutionary cycle of the Internet, publishers devised methods to provide dynamic content to users based on the user's “surfing” habits. One way to provide dynamic content is for a Web server to examine the cookies stored on the user computer's memory.
A cookie is a small piece of information that a server sends to a client. When a user visits a Web site with cookie capabilities, the Web site server sends certain information about the user to the browser which is stored on the user's hard drive as a text file. At some later time (such as returning to the site the next day), the Web server retrieves the cookie. In this way, the server may “remember” items about the user. Other websites may use cookies to learn more about the user in order to provide dynamic content which will most likely appeal to the user. For example, if a user's computer has stored multiple cookies from gambling websites, a Web server may serve dynamic content which advertises a Web casino.
There are several other methods used by websites to serve dynamic content. The more that is known about a user, the better the targeting of the dynamic content. As a result, websites requiring user membership and offer services, such as, for example banking services, will generally be able to provide more accurately targeted dynamic content to its users by analyzing transactional data. Transactional data may be information relating to a user's purchasing history, for example. Therefore, purchasing patterns can be a valuable source of information in providing dynamic content.
Currently, no sufficient solutions exist that display text offers dynamically without impacting the page download time. The conventional wisdom to solve this download problem was to offer the user the option to display text only. However, this is not desirable under most circumstances because related photographs and graphics will not be displayed on the Web page. With a sharp increase in advertising on the Web, loading Web pages has become time consuming in many instances. However, loading standard content along with dynamic content requires greater bandwidth and can be an annoyance to users. Therefore, there is a need for a system and method for providing dynamic content without substantially effecting the load time for the main content.